It has been thirteen years since it happened. April 20, 1999 is a day that has gone down in history. Some know the date but slowly it’s being forgotten. For me, it will always be a date I will remember.
I was eleven and in the 5th grade. I remember that I was going to daycare when school let out which means that I would go to the front porch and wait until one of the daycare staff members came and got me. But this day we didn’t go to the porch. We stayed downstairs and we were told we would be picked up there. Odd. But I continued to play with my friends. When we were picked up we went through the building rather than the faster way outside. We were told to stay quiet as possible and we were ushered into the main room. There we had a movie put on in a low sound and all the lights were turned off. We never watched movies unless it was raining and even then it was a rarity. I asked the other kids around me what was going on. One significantly younger than me told me something bad had happened in another school and they turned off the lights because they didn’t want the bad guys to come in through them. Ridiculous and childish and I recognized that but still my blood went cold. Something was terribly wrong.
When my mom came and picked me up. She had been crying and she had to explain to me that when we went home things would be different. As we turned the corner onto Quincy headed towards our home I saw the helicopters, I saw the police cars, and I saw the media. I turned on the TV and my mom and I sat in silence as images of students flinging themselves from windows and others crying filled the screen. There was a shooting down the street at Columbine High School. The high school that all the neighborhood kids went to, the high school my cousin had talked about wanting to go to. I cried with her and tried to imagine what it was like. As I brushed my teeth that night an eerie light shown through our bathroom window… it was small and I know in hindsight it is brighter then what it actually was. But to me the lights of the school staying on well past the time students would have left could have been a spotlight directed straight at me. I tried to sleep but the nightmares came, even at eleven I thought I had too much pride to sleep in mom and dad’s bed… but that night pride had gone and it remained gone for weeks afterwards. As I snuggled close to my mom a loud bang shook the community, it was the final bomb going off from the car in the parking lot. With that the shooting had ended but the rattling that shook us would never truly leave.
The next day was a blur, we didn’t have school, and so I went to my grandma’s house to spend it with my cousin. I was glued to the TV, she begged me to go outside and play but I told her that these were my neighbors and that was my neighborhood. That night we went to Clement Park and looked at the tents that had been set up, tents for each of the students. Personalized with what they loved. Cars lined the grass, cars with flowers, stuffed animals, letters, and the emptiness of never having their rightful owner drive them again. We all cried. We didn’t know each other but in that moment we all did. Going to McDonald’s changed… with our meals they handed out stickers. Stickers that said “we are all columbine” the slogan for the tragedy to unite us…a slogan that has become a part of me. A part of me will always be with Columbine.
Some wonder why it changed me so much. I didn’t know anyone personally that was killed, although now I feel like I did with some of them. I didn’t even know anyone that was shot. My neighbor was but I haven’t even said two words to him. And yet if I had to pinpoint a life changing day this is one of the first ones that come to mind. To me this is the day that 15 people were killed and along with their deaths was the death of my innocence. Not many can pinpoint that exact moment they grew up the most, the moment where barbies began to fade, the moment where the maturity of knowing how big the world is and how you are not the center of it, and the moment when you realize that beautiful world you live in is different than what you had seen while chasing the butterflies. I can.
Over the next couple weeks more and more information came out about the killers. They were two boys who were “teased” they were members of the trench coat mafia, they watched the “matrix” and that’s where they got the idea to hide guns under their coats, they listened to marylin Manson. The boys worked at black jack, the one down the street from me and one that I walked past every single day while going to school my junior and senior year. They also worked at the firework stand up the street and that is where they got all of their gunpowder. That was the part that hit home the most. I remembered them. We had bought our fireworks from them. I don’t know why I would remember them almost a full year later but I did and I still see their faces in that tent. They looked ordinary, they were just two boys who were working there to earn more money, I thought. Never would you have guessed they would cause so much chaos and so much heartache. And that is when it hit me that the bad guys were not the masked images we saw on TV, they were not the villains of the Disney movies, the bad guys were normal people. The bad guys were us. This thought shook me to my core and I retreated into myself. If these two boys could be bad, I told myself, then I could be bad. I refused to listen to Marylin Manson ever, still do not. I still have not watched the Matrix. Years later I know that these were not the cause of the evil that came out of them. And now we realize that all of these things were not even true. However, at the time it didn’t matter to me. They were true then and I didn’t want to become evil. I began to think of different ways people could be killed, a morbid thought for an eleven year old. However, I was convinced that I could become evil like the hulk would transform. I wouldn’t see it.
After weeks of talking with my parents I realize that it was ridiculous but my innocence was still loss in the halls of Columbine High School. It has been 13 years, I have graduated from high school and college. My life has taken me from Colorado and to Florida. Yet, not a week passes that, that school doesn’t come to mind. Not a month passes where I don’t wonder how our world and my world would have been different if those boys had been taken by the light instead of the darkness. One of my favorite movie quotes (yes, another one) is from the movie, “Where the Heart Is”. Ashley Judd asks Natalie Portman what to tell her kids in regards to the man that did horrific things to them, a man they trusted, “You tell them that our lives can change with every breath we take… and tell ‘em to hold on like hell to what they’ve got. You tell them we’ve got meanness in us, but we’ve got goodness in us too. And the only thing worth living for is the good. And that’s why we’ve got to make sure to pass it on.” Eric Harris and Dylan Kleabold took a lot that day, but out of smoke rose goodness. Rachel Scott’s incredible attitude and heart have lived on through a movement that her family continues on, so many of the students had passions and dreams that were so many years beyond themselves and with that they have lived years beyond themselves. We all have meanness in us but we have good too. Which will you choose to show today? We are all Columbine. I will always be with Columbine.
